Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
A n Am biguous Position
The considerable symbolic power the media possess today - especially radio and television, owing principally to their wide diffusion
and the impact their images seem to have on the general public -
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no doubt explains why this tension is now tending to become quasipermanent. If there is a properly joumalistic exploitation of this
malaise insofar as journalists employ formulas to win large audiences,
it nevertheless remains that the profession is unarguably traversed by
a sort of endemic crisis. This is shown by, among other indicators,
the recent spate of books written by journalists on the news and its
vagaries, as well as on the current transformation of the profession.
Some evoke the gap in the education o f journalists, which is seen as
too weak with respect to the power they now hold simply by virtue
of technological progress; others denounce an all-powerful mediacracy, which rules unchecked; still others point, on the contrary, to
the manipulation of journalists by political authorities (as during the
first Gulf War and Kosovo), or, more generally, to the proliferation
since the m id-1970s o f public relations consultants of all kinds, who
produce ready-made events and media campaigns for all who
can pay their exorbitant fees.
This malaise, which affects a not insignificant part of the journalistic scene, in fact expresses in its way all the ambiguity of the journalistic fields position in the field of power. This position is very
powerful in its effects (wfiich explains why some speak, a bit naively,
of the press as the fourth estate ), but, at the same time, by reason
of this very power finds its operation strongly dominated and controlled by other fields, especially the economic and the political. In
other words, to paraphrase a well-known expression, many social
actors, especially those who belong to various fractions of the dominant class, think that the press is too serious a matter to be left to
journalists.
This situation is far from radically new, however, and cannot in
itself explain the recent boom in criticai discourse about the news
professions. The autonomy of the joumalistic field has always been
threatened; one has no difficulty finding numerous alarmist discourses of the same kind at the end of the nineteenth century, at the
time of the rise of the popular press, or later, episodically in response
to events or limit-situations such as wartime censorship, which places
journalists in the position o f victims, or, conversely, media excesses,
which put them in the position of the accused (so-called media lynchings). Despite the joumalistic milieus incontrovertible efforts to
professionalize its activities, to submit only to intellectual imperatives
and techniques of information production - evinced, among other
things, by the creation of the first school of journalism at the end of
the nineteenth century and their proliferation over the past few
decades - it seems that journalists search for autonomy runs up
against two limits: on the one hand, the strictly political requirements
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who are quick to denounce his professional failings, above all when
they are perceived as concessions to ratings. Conversely, as individu
ais, the journalists at L e M onde can ostensibly mark their distance
from television news, which, in their eyes, is not made by true jour
nalists but only by presenters. A fortiori, they can refuse to participate directly in such and such a news program (even if refusals
tend to be increasingly rare). This cannot be the case for the editorin-chief of a newspaper, who is responsible for the general interests
of the paper and therefore cannot totally ignore the imperatives of
circulation; this editor is generally pleased, even flattered, to see a
story broken by his or her paper picked up and cited by the tele
vision channels; furthermore, he or she cannot completely ignore in
the columns of the editors own paper the subjects addressed on tel
evision, even those that seem trivial, since a story on national televi
sion news, by virtue of its broad diffusion and the impact of images,
tends in itself to be an event. (We should say television news pro
grams instead of television news in general, but the logic of this
type of media tends to exert a powerful effect of uniformity, so that
the same stories run on the news programs of different channels,
often in the same order).
If the opposition between the limited-circulation and the popular
press is not new - it was clearly established by the end of the nineteenth century with the appearance of the penny broadsheet (still
represented by Londons Sun and Mirror, or the New York Post) it remains the case that the generalized diffusion of television from
the mid-1970s onwards has profoundly changed the general economy
of news production, and in particular the relation of forces between
the two types of press. The popular press has never had the legiti
macy that television tends to have today, especially since the privatization of television (or loosening of State Controls in the case of public
television), the professionalization of the work of television joumalists (some of whom come from the print press), and above all the visibility and reach of this medium, which makes it central for all
political action. Thus, the functional weight of the audiovisual sector
in the total process of news production tends to be greater and
greater, the strong position occupied by L e M onde even a few years
ago being progressively taken over by, or at least shared with, tele
vision news programs.
There is an objective hierarchy among the different media outlets
that can be seen not only in the laws regulating the circulation of
information, but also in what we can call the phenomena of story
pick-up. The press is first of all read by all journalists looking for
story ideas. Starting each day with the already existing news, they
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thus try to distinguish themselves from competing papers by bringing, sometimes according to a logic of one-upmanship, a plus (as
they say at Libration) or an original angle of attack. Important news
is thus news that is considered important by the whole of the media
and picked up as such, certain outlets nevertheless having more
consecrating power within the field than others. A story that, for
example, appears in the satirical weekly L e Canard encbain and is
not picked up by another outlet remains a Canard encbain story and
has only a very limited political effect.* Being picked up by L e M onde,
however, changes the status of the story, transforming an item of
gossip into an issue worthy of political debate. And being picked up
by television news makes it into a national issue. If each outlet and
each journaiist is attentive to, not to say obsessed by, this process of
story pick-up, this is because, on the one hand, it constitutes a sort
of sanction proper to the journalistic milieu (all journalists experience a certain pride at seeing one of their articles picked up by other
outlets, especially the most prestigious, which is seen as proof of the
intrinsic importance of the story they originally broke). On the other
hand, it is because a storys political efficacy, its capacity to upset and
impose itself as a current event that cannot be ignored, depends on
its being picked up by other media, especially the most prestigious or
efficacious insofar as they give it symbolic value added: the Parisian
daily press is higher than the provincial dailies, with Le M onde
and to lesser extent Libration on the one side, and the television
news programs on the other.
The most prestigious media outlets thus have greater weight in the
production of news because they are read more, their stories are
picked up more often by other outlets, and because they exert a true
power of consecration on other papers by virtue of whether they pick
up their stories. There has long been a separation between the main
stream popular press and the so-called serious press, with the latter
principally feeding public debates. The new weight of the audiovisual
media in the production of major news has helped overcome this
frontier, thereby changing the logic of public debate as well as the
economy that governs the market of opinions. It is no doubt here
that the greatest source of anxiety among those who reflect on the
evolution o f the profession lies.
Notes
During the 1980s and 1990s, French television and print journalists were
widely criticized for various violations of ethical or professional norms,
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BOURDIEU AND
THE JOURNALISTIC
FIELD
EDITED BY RODNEY BENSON
AND ERIK NEVEU
Polity